PITCHf/x data is able to make a significant contribution to injury prediction.

Injuries, I think we can all agree, are a deplorable scourge on baseball. They remove our favorite players indiscriminately from the field, or ruin their effectiveness. They can take teams that are great on paper and reduce them to smoldering piles of ash (see the Texas Rangers, 2014). Even though injuries appear random, the result of bad luck and stochastic variation, they are (to a limited extent) predictable. Based on prior research, it turns out that commonsense factors can predispose position players to injury.

In particular, my last foray into the subject found that age as well as the number of days missed in the past three seasons could provide a reliable prediction into how many days each position player would miss in the coming year. However, the accuracy of these predictions was modest, and required extensive information from prior years. It would be desirable to make further improvements upon these injury predictions, but in the absence of other possible sources of information, prospects seemed slim.

The two-time Tommy John survivor will wait before signing this winter, while Jurickson Profar is recovering nicely.

Brandon Beachy in no hurry to sign
The link above goes to the first in a series of tweets from FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal, relaying a statement from Rob Martin, who represents Brandon Beachy. To save you the trip to Rosenthal’s timeline, here is the quoted statement in its entirety:

Enter the Texas Rangers, who began the offseason looking to acquire a catcher to share the workload with Robinson Chirinos, a converted backstop who has dealt with concussion issues in the past. As far as in-house options to complement Chirinos, the Rangers reportedly want Tomas Telis to get more seasoning at Triple-A before relying on him at the big-league level. Jorge Alfaro is still probably a year away from The Show.

Alexi Ogando expected to sign next week
A three-win pitcher as recently as 2011, Alexi Ogando was non-tendered by the Rangers on December 2nd, falling victim to the “what have you done for me lately?” nature of the business. What he’s done lately is post a 6.84 ERA over just 25 innings of major-league work last year, before UCL trouble in his elbow forced him to the shelf, and that wasn’t worth a raise over his $2.6 million salary for 2014.

Kicking off the series with a team that surprisingly was baseball's worst in 2014.

With the offseason just around the corner, it’s time to kick off our fantasy team previews. Last year, we ran these in conjunction with the top 10 prospect posts, but we’re giving them their own spotlight this year. We’re also going to be using a little bit of a different format, so let us know if there are gaps in the coverage or anything like that, so we can address it.

We’re kicking off the team previews with the worst team in baseball, the Houston Astros. No, that’s not right. The Texas Astros. Dammit. The Texas Rastros. Sonofabitch this is hard. If you’re a Rangers fan, it’s not hard to conceive that the team you watched day in and day out was baseball’s worst. For the rest of us though, it’s a bizarre notion that the Rangers finished in last place, and perhaps moreso that the Astros didn’t, for once (settle down Rockies fans, we’ll get to you).